In my short time using Symfony the latest release Symfony 2.0 has spawned a large number of useful bundles for developers to draw from when building their applications. Most of the bundles are hosted on Git Hub and have extremely comprehensive installation instructions so I am not going to go into depth about how to use my favourite bundles just why I think they are useful.

1) FOSUserBundle, this gives support for a database-backed user system. It is compatible with Doctrine’s ORM & ODM. It also handles common tasks such as user login, registration and password retrieval.

2) SonataMediaBundle, just as the creators state, “a media management bundle on steroids”. This bundle makes all your media management a piece of cake, files, images, Dailymotion, Vimeo and YouTube media items are all supported.

3) AcmePizzaBundle, this is not a bundle that you would want to include in any final project however it makes it into the list as a very valuable learning resource. This is particularly useful when trying to understand the extremely flexible Symfony Form framework.

4) AsseticBundle, this is extremely useful for compressing and maintaining your assets within your Symfony 2 project. In my previous article you can see how this bundle is used and the simple configuration.

5) OryzoneBoilerplateBundle, built to bring HTML5 Boilerplate to Symfony. The OryzoneBoilerplateBundle allows you to use a twig template based on the great HTML5 ★ Boilerplate 2.0. So with this bundle you can easily create heavily optimized HTML5 twig templates empowered with great features such as CSS resets, CDNed jquery (with offline fallback), asynchronous google analytics script etc. most important of all….. you get the hot pink craziness!